The convergence of the mobile telephone network, the static telephone network, and the IP network provides a myriad of communication options for users. If one seeks to contact another individual, he or she may do so by electronic mail or e-mail, instant messaging, Short Message Service (SMS), wired or wireless telephone, personal computer, pager, personal digital assistant or PDA, and Unified Messaging or UM systems, to name but a few. These options open up new possibilities not only for identifying and introducing unrelated persons with similar interests, passions, beliefs, experiences, or needs but also for identifying and introducing to a requestor an unrelated person having a skill able to meet the requestor's needs.
Prior to network convergence, such introductions by transmitted signals were commonly effected by skills-based routing in contact centers. Contact centers employ work distribution algorithms to pair incoming contacts with human agents. Contact centers can also set up meetings between parties unknown to each other by voice contact or Web server. If party A wishes to set up a telephonic meeting with an agent or party B for example, party A calls or emails the business associated with party B and requests customer assistance. In the contact center paradigm, the work distribution algorithm collects information about party A and the purpose of the contact and then selects an appropriate agent (party B) to service the contact. The servicing session may occur immediately thereafter or be scheduled by the contact center for a later time. In a Web browsing session, the request for assistance is sent by the Web browser to the Web server. The request is then directed to the work distribution algorithm. The logic then proceeds as in the prior example. Contact centers, however, use attributes or skills associated with talents acquired by agents via training. They do not consider, in matching persons, social network attributes, such as interests, passions, beliefs, experiences, or needs.
Post-network-convergence examples of interpersonal communication architectures, include email lists, bulletin boards, and blogs. These mechanisms, however, are generally slow, inefficient, and may result in sub-optimal pairings of persons and, as a result, low quality information transfer to an interested person. It is generally not possible to create in advance the ideal mailing list of individuals or a sufficient number of bulletin boards or blogs that will have the ideal membership for a specific question. In the prior art, someone may send an email question to a mailing list of several hundred people or submit a question to a bulletin board or blog with several hundred members. This is highly inefficient when there may be only a very small number of individuals who are truly capable of answering this specific question. The result is that several hundred people waste time considering the proffered question, and that the requestor may receive many answers of varying accuracy and quality and may have to wait hours or even days before such answers are received.
The need for an effective interpersonal communication architecture is illustrated by the rise in importance to product loyalty of peer-promotion or word-of-mouth recommendations of current customers utilizing a product or service. Traditional forms of marketing, such as advertising, direct mail, and the like, are becoming less and less effective. Much of the recommendations made for a particular product or service occur as random events. Examples include chance meetings in social settings, anecdotal or historical comments, and/or in scenarios where close human proximity occurs, such as airplanes, trains, buses, and the like. The challenge for companies is that there is no structured way to control these events from occurring or not. The events are superfluous and random, yet critical to the future success of global businesses. Companies are becoming less and less able to influence these occurrences in a specific and structured manner. They are also hindered by the fact that there is a geographical dispersion occurring in their product promoters. These individuals may be located any place at any time and in a totally different locale than a potential new customer who is considering the product.
Even if unrelated persons are identified and introduced to one another, there is no mechanism for scheduling a communication session until they have exchanged contact information and manually initiate a meeting. Current meeting schedulers or calendar modules use invitations transmitted between known and specified parties to set up meetings. The invitation fields are manually inputted by one of the parties after they are made known to one another. There is limited ability of persons unknown to one another or unspecified in the invitation to use invitations to set up meetings.
There is thus a need for an interpersonal identification and introduction architecture that is fast, accurate, and efficient.